Thursday 25 June 2009 19.01 EDT
First published on Thursday 25 June 2009 19.01 EDT

Michael Mann is talking about the last two hours of John Dillinger's life, as the infamous and charismatic midwestern bank-robber sat in the Biograph movie theatre in Chicago, watching Clark Gable playing Blackie Gallagher, a suspiciously Dillingeresque criminal, in WS Van Dyke's Manhattan Melodrama.

"There's even a reference to Dillinger in the early part of the movie!" says Mann. "Imagine being John Dillinger sitting there in the movie house. All your friends are dead; your woman, the true love of your life, is gone. There's fewer and fewer people like you any more. You're facing these gigantic evolutionary forces trying to crush you - organised crime on the one hand and the FBI on the other. And the end is near. You're not a sentimentalist about it - you don't think you're going to live for ever anyway. And you, Dillinger, are sitting there and Clark Gable delivers these words to you, while unbeknownst to you, less than 75 feet away there are 30 FBI agents out there planning to kill you."

John Dillinger, the Indiana farm boy who robbed more banks than historians can now count, and busted out of not one but two jails, was and remains intimately linked with the movies. He didn't just like Clark Gable movies - he looked like Clark Gable. It is said that he copped his signature move of vaulting elegantly over a bank's counter, one hand on the wood, the other clutching a huge Thompson machine gun, from some Warner Brothers gangster movie or other. Having spent the years 1924 to 1933 - the whole of his 20s - rotting in an Indiana penitentiary for a drunken, botched mugging he always regretted, he was insatiably hungry for life and whatever it could offer in the depths of the Great Depression. Money, women, excitement - sure, he got all these and more in the headlong, event-filled last 13 months of his life, but he also loved the movies, which had gone from silent to sound while he was inside, and he went as often as he could manage. One scene in Public Enemies, Mann's tremendously gripping account of Dillinger's criminal career, shows him watching a newsreel about himself in a crowded cinema. The news announcer tells the audience that Dillinger "may be in the seat right next to you in this theatre", and asks everyone to "look at the person to your left, and now to your right ..." No one spots the feted outlaw. One of the funniest lines in the movie comes near the end when the team of FBI agents must decide which local movie house Dillinger is more likely to attend that evening. The two nearest cinemas are showing Manhattan Melodrama and Little Miss Marker. Referring to the latter, one of the agents ventures, laconically, "I don't see John Dillinger watching no Shirley Temple picture."

Quite right. Dillinger was shot down by the FBI, led by Special Agent Melvin Purvis (played in the movie by Christian Bale), outside the Biograph that same evening. Thereafter he lived in legend, and in movies. He's the basis for Humphrey Bogart's doomed gangster Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra and he lurks behind characters such as Farley Granger's Bowie in Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night. He's played (with staggering inaccuracy) by bad-boy actor Lawrence Tierney in the King brothers' Dillinger (1945); by Warren Oates (like Gable, a convincingly simian lookalike) in John Milius's Dillinger (1973); by Robert Conrad in Lewis Teague's The Lady in Red (1979); and by Mark Harmon in the TV movie Dillinger (1991). He's a bona fide American folk hero, even 75 years after his death.

"He was a national hero as well," adds Mann (who, considering he's friends with seasoned cops and lots of professional criminals, is oddly socially awkward, diffident and, dare I say it, a tad nerdish, in person). "When we were location-scouting, we went up to Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish, Wisconsin [the site of an infamous shoot-out between the FBI, Dillinger and his gang, including the psychotic, trigger-happy manic depressive Lester "Baby Face" Nelson]. We walked into this lodge, which is is still standing and is something of a local tourist attraction. They'd taken all the contemporary newspaper accounts and kind of used them as wallpaper - all Dillinger headlines. Chicago American, newspapers like that. Monday, three-inch-high typeface: 'Dillinger breaks out of jail!' Tuesday: 'Dillinger robs bank in Grangecastle!' Then Saturday ... same thing, Monday, Wednesday ... I mean, this was every two or three days! We were scouting up there during the presidential primaries and, believe me, Obama didn't get banner headlines like this guy! Dillinger at one point was the second most popular man in America after President Roosevelt. And he was a national hero for a good reason. He was robbing the very institutions, the banks, which had afflicted the people for four years, and after four years nothing was getting any better. You're in the depths of the Great Depression in 1933 and when the authorities came after him - these were the same authorities that couldn't fix anything. They also couldn't remedy the misery of people out of work, or made homeless, or made into orphans by the Dustbowl. They couldn't do anything right, and they also couldn't catch John Dillinger. And he had a wicked sense of humour and really knew how to use the press. He was outrageous and funny, so you bet he was a hero."

Public Enemies is the first movie to attempt to disentangle the Dillinger myth from the facts - until now every other filmmaker has, so to speak, printed the legend - and one wonders, in retrospect, why it took Mann this long to get around to it, so well matched are the gangster's story and the themes and concerns that have animated Mann throughout his career. Mann got to grips with the story after reading, in Vanity Fair, an extract from Bryan Burrough's comprehensive history of the rural bandits of the 1930s (also called Public Enemies). While researching, Burrough noticed that all the infamous bandits, bank robbers and kidnappers of the period - Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis and Ma Barker's hellish brood, and Dillinger himself - all rose and fell in a single 14-month period in 1933-34. The perception that a national crimewave was under way gave J Edgar Hoover, then a little-known Washington bureaucrat heading a toothless agency of unarmed agents, the chance to consolidate his power and lay the foundations for a federal police force able to pursue criminals across state lines.

Mann recruited screenwriters: NYPD Blue writer and Southland creator Ann Biderman, and novelist and sometime Guardian writer Ronan Bennett. Mann had admired Bennett's Congo-based novel The Catastrophist and an unfilmed screenplay about Che Guevara: "We met up because Ronan had done time [Bennett was wrongly convicted of a political murder as a schoolboy in Northern Ireland and was imprisoned in Long Kesh for a year until his conviction was overturned], and with his background I felt he had an understanding of Dillinger even though there was nothing about his culture to clue him into Dillinger at all." It probably helped that Bennett had also written two movies - Face and Lucky Break - about professional criminals and a prison escape, respectively. Together they pared down Burrough's epic into a manageable narrative.

The writers tossed out Bonnie and Clyde, who still have enough unearned mythic weight to capsize a movie about Dillinger. They ditched the Barkers - aside from a few passing appearances by Alvin Karpis (played by Giovanni Ribisi), the mastermind of the Barker gang - and cut everything about Pretty Boy Floyd except his death at the hands of Purvis. That left Dillinger and his occasional cohort Baby Face Nelson (played by the British actor Stephen Graham), and Dillinger's girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard).

What results is a Michael Mann movie through and through. In structural outline, it has much in common with his other movies: a charismatic, dedicated and doomed professional criminal (who nonetheless, like James Caan's heist-man Frank in Thief, would describe himself as "a straight arrow") faces off against an equally competent antagonist (in this case Purvis). The criminal strives for independence and self-determination, but is oppressed and thwarted not just by his near-doppelganger on the right side of the legal fence, but by wider forces that seek to capture or exploit him, in this case the Feds and the nascent Chicago Outfit, which sees the bank robbers as a distracting anachronism drawing unwelcome heat down on their own oddly corporate endeavours. Each antagonist has his own army-like group of cohorts, all carefully ranked and calibrated, just like the DEA and the drug-lords in Miami Vice, the thieves and the cops in Heat and Thief, the Redcoats and the Native Americans in Last of the Mohicans, or even CBS News and big tobacco in The Insider. Dillinger at one point expresses the desire to "just slide off the edge of the map", a sentiment also voiced by Frank in Thief, who essentially destroys his entire life just to prevent others - crooked cops and more senior criminals - encroaching on his independence, and by Heat's bank-robber Neal McCauley (Robert De Niro), whose code requires him to drop out of his own life in a trice at the first sign of a bust. "I'm fascinated with intense lives," Mann tells me. "My own, I guess, or Jeff Wiegand's or Lowell Bergman's (in The Insider), or an aviator in the case of Howard Hughes."

A lot of your heroes are doomed, then?

"Well, you know, we're all doomed in a way ..." he chuckles. "We're all going to the same place, but I'm most interested in people who are actually aware of it. Doomed, facing death - it's also a big theme in 1933, it's what people were thinking about."

If Dillinger was thinking about death, he didn't seem to fear it much.

"The movie I saw in my head, the movie I wanted to make, had to do with this kinda wild guy who wants everything, and he wants it right now, with this passion. And he doesn't just get released from prison - he explodes out of the landscape, wanting everything he hasn't had for 10 years with all the power and force of his personality and his skill-sets. And he launches this unique ride, this white-hot trajectory - three or four lifetimes' worth of dynamics crowded into one lifetime that, finally, is only 13 months long. It's taking down the Greencastle bank on the way to picking Billie up in Florida. And saying to her, 'Where do you want to spend Christmas?' 'I dunno, Tuscon?' I mean they're driving all over the country like there's a freeway system, but a good 20, 30 years before there was a freeway system. And they seem to score on a Monday, and then get shot up on Thursday and get patched up a week later and then take down another bank the next day. Then they're pinched next Monday and then they're on a plane being extradited to another state, and then he breaks out of that jail, then they shoot their way out of that scrape. Not in the movies - in real life! So the intensity of it - and where does he think he's going? That for me is really the heart of it - what's he thinking from the inside-out? For me, it's the opportunity to take this intense trajectory, this fascinating life filled with mystery, and, if I could, to locate an audience intimately within the frame of his existence and to experience some of that rush of ... where's this going? What're you doing? You're not gonna live for ever. And then you find yourself in the movie, in the Biograph - to be on that ride. That is why I made the movie."

There is this sort of reassuringly familiar formula governing many of Mann's movies, no matter how disparate their themes, and Public Enemies successfully reworks it once again. This time, however, Mann was faced with the formidable visual and folkloric iconography established by Warner Bros and RKO gangster movies in the 1930s and 1940s, and then thoroughly reworked and revised by the long succession of 30s-revival movies that came in the wake of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde (including Milius's Dillinger). Mann was in danger of treading some wearyingly stale and over-familiar ground.

"I had a different orientation," he says. "Mine was to make it so you feel you're there. I didn't want audiences looking at 1933. As far as I could make it happen, I wanted to make them feel like they were in 1933. Hence I used hi-def, and that determined the range of choices on the surfaces of everything: set decoration, wallpaper, fabrics, clothes, everything. It became like, pile detail upon detail so it feels as complex as" - he points across his hotel suite - "that desktop over there, or the mess on top of that bureau up there."

Choosing to shoot the movie digitally has evoked some anger and confusion among viewers who saw the movie early on and claimed that it takes the spectator out of the illusion of period reality (I would disagree - to me, the movie looks stunningly clear and immediate). One associates digital photography more with Mann's steel-and-glass contemporary works - Heat, The Insider, Collateral - not with the largely brick-and-wood environments of the 1930s rural midwest, but Mann remains unapologetic. "Digital makes things feel more real, like you could reach out and touch them. You can see every pore on Depp's face. You get great depth-of-field, we got very close with the lenses, and you don't have that fuzzy lack of focus at night. That was why we went digital. I thought I was gonna shoot on film and I did these tests side-by-side. I came away from the tests - we just brought a Sony F23 camera out there to look at it, to be diligent - and I looked at them, and that [celluloid] looked like a period film, and this [digital] looked like what it was like to be alive in 1933. In the end it made total sense: video looks like reality, it's more immediate, it has a vérité surface to it. Film has this liquid kind of surface, feels like something made up."

What did he ask of his lead actors, Depp and Bale? "Immersion, mainly. I'm having a good time shooting this, but on a more serious level, I ain't playing. This isn't a lark. The commitment I need from both guys is right there, though. And then you get into the relativistic discussion of how actors work. Suffice it to say, every actor works differently. Laurence Olivier would put on his costume and when the wardrobe was right, he was in character. That sounds superficial, but it's true, and look at the results. Johnny plays very strongly when he feels an inner identification, which he certainly felt with John Dillinger. He'd been interested in Dillinger for a long time. So he draws from an internal source; the wardrobe is important to him, certain physical things. What I was after from Depp, as a Johnny Depp fan, is what I wanted to see Johnny Depp do - something I hadn't seen him do for a long time - was play a tough man. And Johnny is a man - he's not a boy, but a tough man. And secondly, I know some of the deeper currents within him, and I wanted to see an emotionally exposed piece of work from him. That was the entry requirement for him doing this. And Christian Bale has a completely different way of working; he just dives into the deep end of the pool, that's it. From day one to the last day of shooting. There's no work in this film by any of these fine, fine actors, starting with Johnny, that is performance. I mean, they are there. They're living it, and being it."

Public Enemies is rife with contemporary echoes and not simply because it's the first large-scale movie about the Great Depression to be made in the shadow of this depression, however great it turns out to be. Billy Crudup's Hoover has a Rumsfeldian cast of mind - he's an adept political manipulator using a perceived period of national distress to build up a formidable power-base of an agency, and he's not shy about using torture. At one point he tells Purvis, in his prissy, strangulated accent, "Suspects are to be interrogated 'vigourously'. Grilled. No obsolete notions of sentimentality. We are in the modern age and we are making history. Take direct, expedient action." And he adds, with a fascistic flourish reminiscent of Rumsfeld's Abu Ghraib memos, "As they say in Italy these days, 'Take off the white gloves.'" When Billie Frechette is beaten late in the movie to extract Dillinger's whereabouts, you just know what that fat Chicago phonebook on the desk will be used for (James Caan was abused with the same tome in Thief).

But even Mann, preparing the movie in 2007 and shooting it last year, had no idea how contemporary Public Enemies would seem by its release date. Was that just luck?

"Well," he laughs sardonically, "I dunno about 'luck'. I wouldn't call this a 'lucky' time in our history. It certainly has happened. I doubt the echoes will be a big factor with audiences. I mean, it is to you and I and others who observe these things, these historical patterns, but as for everyone else," he ventures, with a nod to Transformers, his principal competitor at the multiplexes this summer, "I guess they'll show up after they're all done with flying robots and toys."

The director of Heat, Collateral and the new, Johnny Depp-starring Public Enemies shares what drew him to the story of John Dillinger, and why he'd like to revisit the 18th-century setting of The Last of the Mohicans